Business analyst at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
Top 20
Aug 8, 2025
A significant area for improvement in Oracle Essbase is that financial statement analysis, CAPEX and OPEX analysis, and financial consolidation must be done manually, as Oracle Essbase doesn't include the financial consolidation module that is available in EPM. While you can analyze market trends, track expenses, and compare actual expenses against budget and forecast, currency variances can be handled in both Oracle Essbase and Excel. You can maintain aggregation values of all your accounts in finance within Oracle Essbase. Period-end balances and monthly transactions can be included, though it's primarily designed for aggregation values. Different cubes in Oracle Essbase can contain all necessary data, eliminating the need to source data from multiple reports for financial analysis, which can be accomplished through the data integrator.
Improvements for Oracle Essbase could be made, as there are many tools available now, such as FCCS, TRCS, and ERCS. I find managing the database difficult, especially regarding optimization and data storage with the huge volume of data. At that point, focusing more on performance issues would be beneficial, making it a beautiful tool. Being a centralized repository where all users, including top-level corporate CEOs and CFOs, connect is crucial. If they can make effective tool optimizations, that would provide a significant advantage to compete with other tools currently available in the market.
Oracle Hyperion Essbase Developer at HCL Technologies
Real User
Top 10
Jul 1, 2024
If I got the opportunity to work with Hyperion, which is the best product, I would definitely go with that. The main concern is that Oracle is ending on-premises server support, so it would be better if there was a cloud platform available for Oracle Essbase.
The reporting tool needs improvement. The built-in reporting tool, Reporting Studio, is not up to par compared to Essbase. We use third-party products for reporting. The reporting tool should be upgraded to improve the fetch of the data because it could take time to fetch huge amounts of data. The fetch time could be smaller in its reporting tool. It can also upgrade its interface, but it's already upgraded to the cloud. We can use the cloud version now; we have PBCS, the cloud version of the database on-premise version.
The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement. Clients currently opt more for OneStream for consolidation purposes, rather than HFM or FCCS. The consolidation part might need some improvement in terms of how they perform, how efficiently they are.
Senior Reg Reporting Consultant at Bank of America
Real User
Mar 27, 2023
They should improve the solution's performance. Whenever we have a lot of reports to test, it takes considerable time for the process. They should have a customized back or front-end feature to rectify and fix the errors. Every time, in case of link breakage, we ask the administrator to look into it. Instead, they should add a feature to deal with it so that we save time and effort.
Senior Hyperion Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 12, 2022
It's not a very scalable solution. Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good. What they had for doing the forecasting was another program from another company. They bought the program, then you could actually do the forecasting in Excel, rather than actually doing it in the Hyperion program. I can't think of any missing features or areas of improvement. Overall, it's a pretty decent product.
Oracle Essbase is an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Server that provides an environment for deploying pre-packaged applications or developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications.
A significant area for improvement in Oracle Essbase is that financial statement analysis, CAPEX and OPEX analysis, and financial consolidation must be done manually, as Oracle Essbase doesn't include the financial consolidation module that is available in EPM. While you can analyze market trends, track expenses, and compare actual expenses against budget and forecast, currency variances can be handled in both Oracle Essbase and Excel. You can maintain aggregation values of all your accounts in finance within Oracle Essbase. Period-end balances and monthly transactions can be included, though it's primarily designed for aggregation values. Different cubes in Oracle Essbase can contain all necessary data, eliminating the need to source data from multiple reports for financial analysis, which can be accomplished through the data integrator.
Improvements for Oracle Essbase could be made, as there are many tools available now, such as FCCS, TRCS, and ERCS. I find managing the database difficult, especially regarding optimization and data storage with the huge volume of data. At that point, focusing more on performance issues would be beneficial, making it a beautiful tool. Being a centralized repository where all users, including top-level corporate CEOs and CFOs, connect is crucial. If they can make effective tool optimizations, that would provide a significant advantage to compete with other tools currently available in the market.
If I got the opportunity to work with Hyperion, which is the best product, I would definitely go with that. The main concern is that Oracle is ending on-premises server support, so it would be better if there was a cloud platform available for Oracle Essbase.
The solution could enhance business analytics. I delved into the data using Oracle Essbase to create a new support tool.
The reporting tool needs improvement. The built-in reporting tool, Reporting Studio, is not up to par compared to Essbase. We use third-party products for reporting. The reporting tool should be upgraded to improve the fetch of the data because it could take time to fetch huge amounts of data. The fetch time could be smaller in its reporting tool. It can also upgrade its interface, but it's already upgraded to the cloud. We can use the cloud version now; we have PBCS, the cloud version of the database on-premise version.
The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement. Clients currently opt more for OneStream for consolidation purposes, rather than HFM or FCCS. The consolidation part might need some improvement in terms of how they perform, how efficiently they are.
There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness.
They should improve the solution's performance. Whenever we have a lot of reports to test, it takes considerable time for the process. They should have a customized back or front-end feature to rectify and fix the errors. Every time, in case of link breakage, we ask the administrator to look into it. Instead, they should add a feature to deal with it so that we save time and effort.
The solution could be cheaper. It is costly, and the initial setup could be simplified.
The solution is hard to set up for new users. It's an expensive product to use. The solution is a bit complex.
The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved.
It's not a very scalable solution. Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good. What they had for doing the forecasting was another program from another company. They bought the program, then you could actually do the forecasting in Excel, rather than actually doing it in the Hyperion program. I can't think of any missing features or areas of improvement. Overall, it's a pretty decent product.
* It needs a faster way to extract data. * It needs better documentation, as there's a lot of undocumented commands. * It needs a better API.